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Former Ray Charles Raelette Cynthia Scott has written a song about her mother’s illness with Alzheimer. It is told from the perspective of the person who is suffering from this disease and featured in the New York Times under The New Old Age.

NEW YORK, NY— Cynthia Scott’s original song, “Did I Know You”, is touching hearts and souls and is featured in The New York Times as “A Song About Forgetting”. It highlights the life of an Alzheimer sufferer and hearing from her point of view, what she is going through in the relationship with her daughter.

It is just one of the songs on Ms Scott’s current CD, “DREAM FOR ONE BRIGHT WORLD“, that stirs the soul. She sings it from the perspective of the person who is suffering from this disease, which was her mother, Arkansas native Artelia Scott. The history-making CD, the first ever all-original vocal CD to make the jazz week charts, includes songs of hope, RAY CHARLES, loss, homelessness, love, faith, and social issues.

The New York Times writer Paula Spann states: “she was driving in her car when she heard Ms. Scott on NY station WBGO come on the radio. Cynthia Scott’s voice came wafting out of my car radio on a Sunday morning. She’s a lovely singer, a veteran of jazz clubs and international festivals and, back when, one of Ray Charles’s Raelettes. But more than Ms. Scott’s soulful contralto, what made me take notice were the lyrics of the ballad she’s written:

I don’t recollect our meeting

I don’t even know your name

Did I know you?

And if I did, why don’t I remember?

I’d never heard a song about Alzheimer’s disease before.

“It didn’t take long to compose “Did I Know You?”, maybe just 15 minutes, Ms. Scott told me in an interview. She just set down what she’d observed in her mother, Artelia Scott, who died in April 2009, after long years of dementia, at 93. Artelia Scott had raised 12 children in El Dorado, Ark.; Cynthia was the tenth. The bit of dialogue in the song, in which a daughter patiently explains to her mother who she is, recreates one of their actual conversations.

“Notice that the song, from a CD called “Dream for One Bright World”, takes the perspective of the person with Alzheimer’s. “Nobody can tell that story,” Ms. Scott explained. “It’s obvious what the children go through, and we can share it. But what is the person who’s suffering from it going through?”

Ms. Scott played the recording for her mother during a visit to the Kansas City nursing home where she spent the last few years of her life. “I said, ‘Mom, I wrote this song for you.’ But I didn’t see any sign that she knew it was about her.”

No newcomer to the music world, Scott has traveled the globe and has performed with Lionel Hampton, Cab Calloway, David “Fathead” Newman, Bill Charlap, Harry Connick Jr. and many more. An engagement at New York’s Lincoln Center saw celebrity trumpeter Wynton Marsalis introduce her as having the sweetest most soulful voice with the deepest feeling, calling her one of today’s finest jazz singers. But to say that she just sings jazz would be short changing her wide range of musical talents. Scott, the Arkansas-born singer, developed her love of music early singing in church. Her vocal artistry has encompassed the swing of jazz, the soul of rhythm and blues, and the sacred stirrings of gospel music.

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